We Were Bored

so we lifted our shirts
to the passing blur of cars—dark boulevard
flared in headlight, heavy bass—hoping
our budding tits enough to draw the driving

boys tongue-wagged beside us. Heat off
motors, the smell of gasoline and grass,
hair-gel, magazine-issue cologne. Not yet
knowing the size of our own desire or how

to touch it. The years it would take before
our flesh, finally, would yield to a boy’s
rough fingers—working their way inside
our darkness, prying it loose enough to

take what they found and claim it. The
bigness and heat, whapp
of skin against skin in small hot
rooms and all we were promised as we grew,

ghosted around our held skulls,
not quite real enough to touch and still
cold somehow between our fingers. And those nights, long
nights before we knew anything but wanting,

we’d get into cars leaking oil out the engine, mufflers
shot and shouting, with boys we did not know
and speak of nothing, air
thick with all the mistakes we hadn’t made

yet, the sound of legs
crossing and uncrossing against
fake leather. One night, the boys demanded
more, so we lifted our shirts in the moth-beat

glow of their headlights, small breasts
fiercely white, half wanting them to
lunge, thirsty, to take and take and
half wanting to die right there, or to walk away

living and never do it again. Which we did,
for awhile, until too many months passed of
nothing and the heaviness in us grew
wary of itself, needing the scent of gasoline

against summer swell, our legs
stuck to some new boy’s crappy
old seats, uncertain what danger
he held and hoping that, somehow,

we were good enough to want.